Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to storage systems and, more specifically, to creation of snapshots of volumes in a storage system.
Background Information
A storage system typically includes one or more storage devices, such as solid state drives (SSDs), into which information may be entered, and from which information may be obtained, as desired. The storage system may implement a high-level module, such as a file system, to logically organize the information stored on the devices as storage containers, such as volumes. Each volume may be implemented as a set of data structures, including data blocks that store data for the volumes and metadata blocks that describe the data of the volumes. For example, the metadata may describe, e.g., identify, storage locations on the devices for the data.
Management of the volumes may include creation of snapshots (read-only) of the volumes taken at points in time and accessed by one or more clients (hosts) of the storage system. Operations may be performed by the storage system at the points in time to ensure consistency of each created snapshot. For example, operations may be directed to sharing metadata of a data structure between volumes (e.g., parent and snapshot) and allowing reference counting of that data structure. In addition, administration of the volumes may be simplified by collective management of the volumes, e.g., snapshot for each volume using one command. Thus, it is desirable to provide an efficient workflow for the operations performed by a storage system to create a snapshot or collection of snapshots for one or more volumes.